May 2022

Vigilant Gratitude

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In fact, absurdity or irony must surely strike us as a distinctly misplaced and immature response. Why be absurd or ironic in any kind of unnaturally determined and sustained way about something that is precious and fragile and, above all, based on our best approximation of a central truth about our lives? A sense of vigilant gratitude would seem a more apt response, rooted in an honest and undeluded appreciation of the incorrigibly imperfect, frequently cruel, often wilfully destructive, yet infinitely unpredictable, occasionally exquisite and not entirely unhopeful world many of us still find ourselves occupying.

— Johnny Lyons, The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin

Today, I received a book which I ordered one week ago, on the 24th. I noticed when I checked the tracking information that it was being shipped from Johannesburg, South Africa. A couple of days after that, it passed through France, then England, before arriving stateside in Indianapolis. By Saturday, it was slightly north of here. Had it not been for the holiday, I might have even gotten it then, or on Monday.

Obviously, this was a routine transaction, one that we do all the time without thinking about it. Still, I think it’s worthwhile to reflect on just how great it is that we live in a world where it is both fast and affordable to discover the existence of a book, order a copy, and have it delivered to your door from halfway around the world. What would our great-grandparents have made of this?

The Best Social Philosophies

By in books, juxtapositions, lin yutang No Comments

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The best social philosophies do not claim any greater objective than that the individual human beings living under such a regime shall have happy individual lives. If there are social philosophies which deny the happiness of the individual life as the final goal and aim of civilization, those philosophies are the product of a sick and unbalanced mind.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

The Honest Naked Goddess Philosophy

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In an age which suffers from this universal education, to what an unnatural, artificial and in any case unworthy state must the most truthful of all sciences, the honest naked goddess philosophy, be reduced! In such a world of compelled external uniformity it must remain the learned monologue of the solitary walker, the individual’s chance capture, the hidden secret of the chamber, or the harmless chatter of academic old men and children. No one dares venture to fulfill the philosophical law in himself, no one lives philosophically with that simple loyalty that constrained a man of antiquity to bear himself as a Stoic wherever he was, whatever he did, once he had affirmed his loyalty to the Stoa. All modern philosophizing is political and official, limited by governments, churches, academies, customs and the cowardice of men to the appearance of scholarship; it sighs ‘if only’ or knows ‘there once was’ and does nothing else.

— Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, ” Untimely Meditations

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It seems I am destined to become a market philosopher, but it can’t be helped. Philosophy generally seems to be the science of making simple things difficult to understand, but I can conceive of a philosophy which is the science of making difficult things simple. In spite of names like “materialism,” “humanism,” “transcendentalism,” “pluralism,” and all the other longwinded “isms,” I contend that these systems are no deeper than my own philosophy. Life after all is made up of eating and sleeping, of meeting and saying good-bye to friends, of reunions and farewell parties, of tears and laughter, of having a haircut once in two weeks, of watering a potted flower and watching one’s neighbor fall off his roof, and the dressing up of our notions concerning these simple phenomena of life in a kind of academic jargon is nothing but a trick to conceal either an extreme paucity or an extreme vagueness of ideas on the part of the university professors. Philosophy therefore has become a science by means of which we begin more and more to understand less and less about ourselves. What the philosophers have succeeded in is this: the more they talk about it, the more confused we become.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

Reasons Come Seasonal, I’ll Tell You When I Know

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Let’s suppose a philosopher who after having published several works declares in a new book: “Up to now I was going in the wrong direction. I am going to begin all over. I think now that I was wrong.” No one would take him seriously any more. And yet he would then be giving proof that he is worthy of thought.

— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1942-1951

It sounds reasonable enough, but then I look at someone like Sohrab Ahmari:

How many ideological twists and turns has this guy taken in recent years? I can’t keep up. From an Iranian upbringing, to atheism and communism, then to neoconservatism, then Catholicism, plus whatever populist/common-good phase he’s in now. The man is like a human jar of Prego — you name it, it’s in there.

All of us have been wrong, of course. All of us have changed our minds about things we thought were settled. I think most of us, though, would explain that in terms of reconnecting with foundational beliefs and principles from which we’d gotten estranged somehow. For example, thirteen years ago, it seemed self-evident to me that one could be politically left-of-center and see identity politics as a cancerous ideology for lunatics. When push came to shove, as it did shortly thereafter, I chose to continue seeing identity politics as a cancerous ideology even if that meant becoming conservative by default. I had to rethink many things, but in other, more important ways, I hadn’t changed at all. If there is any similar continuity and common denominator in someone like Ahmari, it’s beyond me.

A Magpie’s Nest

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If I could just keep my stupid mind together…

— Sparklehorse, “Sick of Goodbyes”

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Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?

— Francis Bacon, “Of Truth”

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But how it is possible that a soul rich in the knowledge of so many things should not thereby become keener and more alert, and that a crude and commonplace mind can harbor within itself, without being improved, the reasonings and judgments of the greatest minds that the world has produced—that still has me puzzled.

— Montaigne, “Of Pedantry”

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‘I must really improve my mind,’ I tell myself, and once more begin to patch and repair that crazy structure. So I toil and toil on at the vain task of edification, though the wind tears off the tiles, the floors give way, the ceilings fall, strange birds build untidy nests in the rafters, and owls hoot and laugh in the tumbling chimneys.

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

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In optimistic moments I tell myself that I have found the world so interesting that I have been unable to confine my attention to any one subject; in pessimistic ones, that I am by nature lazy and impatient to have done so, with the result that my mind is like a magpie’s nest, full of bright things, perhaps, but overall a mess.

— Theodore Dalrymple, The Pleasure of Thinking: A Journey through the Sideways Leaps of Ideas

We Can Never Really Tell What These New Unknown Persons May Do to Us

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We walk alone in the world,’ the Moralist writes in his essay on Ideal Friendship, somewhat sadly. ‘Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables.’ Yet we never quite give up the hope of finding them. But what awful things happen to us, what snubs, what set-downs we experience, what shames and disillusions. We can never really tell what these new unknown persons may do to us. Sometimes they seem nice, and then begin to talk like gramophones. Sometimes they grab at us with moist hands, or breathe hotly on our necks, or make awful confidences, or drench us from sentimental slop-pails. And too often, among the thoughts in the loveliest heads, we come on nests of woolly caterpillars.

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

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A penny for your thoughts, but a pound not to know them.

— Theodore Dalrymple, Midnight Maxims

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Did you know that George Biden lives in the other White House? OK, I see hands in the air already. Yes, “George” Biden lives in the building that most of us know as the Capitol. Trump still lives in the main White House. I learned this from the weird guy who works in the refrigerated warehouse. Within five minutes of meeting him last year, he had already informed me that his third and current wife was a good one, a real keeper, unlike the previous two who both cheated on him. This one’s great. She brings him to and from work every day since he got that DUI and lost his license. Wonderful gal. Except she gets on the phone and speaks all that Mexican with her family…I didn’t ask to hear any of this! All I said was a perfunctory “Hey howyadoon.”

Everyone thinks I’m exaggerating when I say it, but no — I start from the assumption that most people are effing nuts and barely concealing the fact, and it only takes the slightest opening for them to demonstrate it for you. I’ve got enough friends. The drawbridge is up, the portcullis is down, and the moat is filled with piranhas.

All Beginnings Are Small

By in aphorisms, books, juxtapositions, nietzsche No Comments

One of the surest ways of killing a tree is to lay bare its roots. It is the same with institutions. We must not be too ready to disinter the origins of those we wish to preserve. All beginnings are small.

— Joseph Joubert, Pensées

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Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring.

— Henri Frédéric Amiel, Journal Intime

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There are people who believe that German music could have a transforming and reforming effect on the Germans: they are angered, and consider it an injustice against the most vigorous part of our culture, when they see such men as Mozart and Beethoven already engulfed by all the learned dust of biography and compelled by the torture-instruments of historical criticism to answer a thousand impertinent questions. Does it not mean its premature death or at least paralysis, when that, the living effects of which are not yet exhausted, is subjected to curious investigation of the countless minutiae of its life and works, and when problems of knowledge are sought where one ought to learn to live and forget all problems? Imagine a couple of these modern biographers transported to the birthplace of Christianity or of the Lutheran Reformation; their sober, pragmatic curiosity would have exactly sufficed to render any actio in distans impossible: just as the most wretched little animal can prevent the mightiest oak tree from coming into existence by eating the acorn. All living things require an atmosphere around them, a mysterious misty vapour; if they are deprived of this envelope, if a religion, an art, a genius is condemned to revolve as a star without atmosphere, we should no longer be surprised if they quickly wither and grow hard and unfruitful. It is the same with all great things, ‘which never succeed without some illusion’, as Hans Sachs says in the Meistersinger.

— Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” Untimely Meditations

The Might-Have-Been

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Somewhere there must be storehouses
where all these lives are laid away
like suits of armor or old carriages
or clothes hanging limply on the walls.

Maybe all paths lead there,
to the repository of unlived things.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

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When I seek out the sources of my thoughts, I find they had their beginning in fragile Chance; were born of little moments that shine for me curiously in the past. Slight the impulse that made me take this turning at the crossroads, trivial and fortuitous the meeting, and light as gossamer the thread that first knit me to my friend. These are full of wonder; more mysterious are the moments that must have brushed me evanescently with their wings and passed me by: when Fate beckoned and I did not see it, when new Life trembled for a second on the threshold; but the word was not spoken, the hand was not held out, and the Might-have-been shivered and vanished, dim as a dream, into the waste realms of non-existence.

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

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You and I have never met, many times before. Our paths might have crossed once or twice online, or passing in the street. We might’ve spent an hour sitting back-to-back at the same airport gate, or even exchanged a a few words over the phone, when I dialed your number by mistake. For all we know, we might have been living in the same neighborhood for decades—but against incredible odds, we just happened to miss each other. It’s a big world, after all.

Our days must be filled with these chance encounters, that for a million tiny reasons, never actually happen. Our streets must be teeming with accidental strangers, who just happened to miss their cue—who share everything in common, except for time and place. For years, their stories might’ve been happening in parallel, harmonizing from somewhere across the world, but neither has any idea that the other even exists. If two lines are truly parallel, it means they’ll never actually meet.

It’s hard not to think of your own near-misses, veering away on a tangent, in some alternate universe. The person who would’ve been your best friend in the world might be out there somewhere, milling around a party you weren’t invited to. Your business partner might be sitting on half of a world-changing idea, waiting for your contribution to arrive, though it never will. It’s hard not to glance at a stranger in a crowd, and imagine the life you might have shared, if only things had been different— feeling a pang of missed connection as you carry on your separate ways, leaving nothing but an echo of something that might have been.

You never know how many things had to happen exactly right for you to meet the one you love. You never know how easily fate might have tipped you onto some other course, meeting some stranger, who would feel like a soulmate. As you sit there on your commuter train, wrapped up in your own concerns, you have no way of knowing how close you’re sitting to the person you might have loved, who you might have spent years with, even built a family. You would have looked across the room at this same face, and struggled to imagine life without them, telling yourself that it was always meant to be. As if you had known all along that your paths would cross eventually.

Maybe you were always destined to be sitting right where you’re sitting. Or maybe it’s a miracle that you managed to meet the people you did, knowing how many obstacles might have gotten in the way. Or maybe it’s nothing personal, and it was all just a coincidence. You never know.

— John Koenig, “Moment of Tangency,” The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

He Gave the Impression That Each Word Was Excavated From His Interior By Some Up-to-Date Process of Mining

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A pause suddenly fell on our conversation—one of those uncomfortable lapses when we sit with fixed smiles, searching our minds for some remark with which to fill up the unseasonable silence. It was only a moment—’But suppose,’ I said to myself with horrible curiosity, ‘suppose none of us had found a word to say?’

It is the dread of Something happening, Something monstrously awful, that makes us do anything to keep the flicker of talk from dying out. So travellers at night in an unknown forest keep their fire ablaze, in fear of Wild Beasts lurking in the darkness ready to leap upon them.

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

A few months ago, I achieved something of a life goal: I made it through an entire business lunch without having to say a single word in conversation. (The Lady of the House handles all that stuff; I’m just her arm candy.) Next, I’d like to go an entire work day without having to speak to anyone.  I was voted “quietest” in both seventh and eighth grade, so I think I have a good chance. A guy I used to work with said with surprise, upon hearing me talk one day, that he had thought I was mute, which I took as a compliment. I’ve been called everything from rude to mentally retarded. I’ve basically been in training for this challenge since childhood. I’m gonna take gold in the Taciturn Olympics.

To Change Your Mind

By in books, juxtapositions, montaigne, nietzsche No Comments

What was it about, the disputation into which we plunged, in spite of our desperate efforts to clutch at other subjects? Was it Tariff Reform or Table-rapping—Bacon and Shakespeare, Disestablishment, perhaps—or Anti-Vivisection? What did any of us know or really care about it? What force, what fury drove us into saying the stupid, intolerant, denunciatory things we said; that made us feel we would rather die than not say them? How could a group of polite and intelligent people be so suddenly transformed into barking animals?

Why do we let these Abstractions and implacable Dogmatisms take possession of us, glare at each other through our eyes, and fight their futile, frenzied conflicts in our persons? Life without the rancours and ever-recurring battles of these Bogeys might be so simple, friendly, affectionate, and pleasant!

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

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Time won’t change you, money won’t change you
Drugs won’t change you, religion won’t change you
What’s the matter with you?
I haven’t got the faintest idea
Everything seems to be up in the air at this time

I need something to change your mind

Science won’t change you, looks like I can’t change you
I try to talk to you to make things clear
But you’re not even listening to me
And it comes directly from my heart to you

I need something to change your mind

— Talking Heads, “Mind”

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Ah! How reluctant I am to force my own ideas upon another! How I rejoice in any mood and secret transformation within myself which means that the ideas of another have prevailed over my own!

— Nietzsche, Daybreak

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I enter into conversation and argument with great freedom and facility, since opinions find in me a soil into which they cannot easily penetrate or strike deep roots. No proposition astounds me, no belief offends me, however much opposed it may be to my own. There is no fantasy so frivolous or extravagant that it does not seem to me a natural product of the human mind. Those of us who deny our judgement the right of making final decisions look mildly on ideas that differ from our own; if we do not give them credence, we can at least offer them a ready hearing.

Contradictions of opinion, therefore, neither offend nor estrange me; they only arouse and exercise my mind. We run away from correction; we ought to court it and expose ourselves to it, especially when it comes in the shape of discussion, not of a school lesson. Each time we meet with opposition, we consider not whether it is just, but how, wrongly or rightly, we can rebut it. Instead of opening our arms to it, we greet it with our claws. I could stand a rough shaking from my friends: ‘You are a fool, you’re talking nonsense.’

In good company, I like expression to be bold, and men to say what they think. We must strengthen our ears and harden them against any weakness for the ceremonious use of words. I like strong and manly acquaintanceships and society, a friendship that prides itself on the sharpness and vigour of its dealings. I like love that bites and scratches till the blood comes. It is not vigorous and free enough if it is not quarrelsome, if it is polite and artificial, if it is afraid of shocks, and is constrained in its ways: ‘for there can be no discussion without contradiction’ (Cicero, De Finibus, I, viii).

When I am opposed, my attention is roused, not my anger. I go out to meet the man who contradicts me and corrects me. The cause of truth ought to be a cause common to us both. How will he reply? The passion of anger has already struck down his judgement; confusion has usurped the place of reason. It would be useful if a wager were to hang on the result of our disputes, if there could be some material mark of our losses, so that we might keep a record of them. My man could then say to me: ‘Your ignorance and stubbornness on some twenty occasions last year cost you a hundred crowns.’

I welcome and embrace the truth in whosoever hands I find it. I cheerfully surrender to it, and offer it my vanquished arms as soon as I see it approaching in the distance. And provided that I am not treated with too imperious and magisterial a frown, I am glad of any criticisms upon my writings. Indeed I have often made changes in them, more out of politeness than because they were improved by it. For I like, by yielding easily, to gratify and foster the freedom to find fault with me, even at some cost to myself.

It is, however, difficult to induce men of my time to do this; they have not the courage to correct because they have not the courage to stand correction; and they never speak frankly in one another’s presence. I take so much pleasure in being judged and known that it is almost indifferent to me whether I am admired or criticized. My mind so frequently contradicts and condemns itself that it is all one to me if someone else does so, especially as I only give his criticism such authority as I choose.

— Montaigne, “On the Art of Conversation”

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